Yes, I'm still talking about Twitter

I thought this word cloud from what I've been tweeting was kinda cool. I created it at TweetCloud.com. These whow the most common words I've tweeted, bigger means I've tweeted more.

Technorati Tags: cloud, twitter, word cloud

I'm on vacation right now, and I do miss Twitter a little bit. I want that constant stream of information. I also have been thinking of things to tweet and I can't.

I can compose a full blog post when I don't have 'net access (and I can even backdate it) but I can't with twitter. I probably won't use twitter at all while I'm out of the country. I'm not going to use what little internet access I have on that, we'll see, maybe I'd find it useful in a different way.

TweetStats

So I've been trying to use Twitter more and I found TweetStats to show me how much.

To give some background: TwitterFeed is actually how my blog posts get cross-posted to Twitter so those really don't count much (started using this Oct 15, 2007). And I just discovered FriendFeed recently. But you can see that tweeting with Twitterific (w/phone and web) I've far surpassed that. Significant if you look at the below chart and see most of it's in the last month. And by looking at my blog post counts (to the left) for the last few months, you can see blogging has declined. But I'll blame the low blogging on 3 things: Twitter (but I am micro-blogging), busier at work (to tired at night to blog) and being sick this season.

Thanks to Julia Roy for pointing it out to me (via Twitter).

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, puppy, tweetstats, Twitter

Passwords suck

Argh! I'm annoyed with creating user accounts. Everyone has their own damn process for passwords:

I'm looking for Detroit Local Tweeters (Twitters)

Can you suggest some Detroit-area people to follow on Twitter? I'm looking for something that has a local geographic flavor, like Dearborn (or Detroit) Michigan.

I'm always looking for more people to follow, but today I'm soliciting suggestions for the Detroit area just to get a slightly less global feel for this Twittery goodness/chaos. I've got a lot of great people that I follow, but I'd love to see some tweets about local restaurants, bars and music.

So send me a message @GaryLaPointe with suggestions or tell someone you know to follow me and I'll find them or just leave a comment. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: Dearborn, Detrot, follow, puppy, Twitter

PhotoShop Express On-Line Edition - Inital testing

So I'm using some Costa Rica photos to test the new free on-line edition of PhotoShop. It's very cool, does more than what most desktop packages do, but while limited, I don't need much more. They give you 2 GB of free storage. It's got cool slideshows (full-scren if you like) but I'm sure it breaks some browsers...

Costa Rica Dec 2007
These photos are from when I was in Costa Rica in December 2007 and left Montezuma and took the ferry from the Lower Nicoya Peninsula (Paquera?) to Puntarenaas.

Looks like you can even download your photos in their original size. They're still in beta so who knows what they'll charge for more storage (or features?).

They do give you a way to put thumbnails and links to photos with having to use their viewer. Although it seems to be a 2 step process (thumbnail then link) for each photo. But it's cheap, high-res and the flash interface is great.

If you love PhotoShop, I'm sure you'll hate it. It's pretty as spplications, but since I don't use any features past version 1, it's very nice and easy to use. Here's a link to the palette with all the main options on it. It's even easier to use than I need it to be (and it has more features to use too). It e-mails a really nice graphical html link to your friends too.

Technorati Tags: Costa Rica, PhotoShop, PhotoShop Express

Understanding Twitter

So I've really been trying to use Twitter more. I read and tweet more at my computer than when I'm out. When I'm out I tweet some but don't generally read. I do have it set to get a text message on my phone automagically if someone tweets my name. If you don't know what Twitter is:

Blocking E-Mail Spam

I'm a huge fan of SpamArrest, a mail program that uses challenge/response CAPTCHAs to only allow mail from humans, instead of from spammers. It works great but the price has gone up from $60 for two years to $90, so I'm checking for other options. It's only an additional $30 but if the price jump is $30 (or worse, 50%) every 2 years, it's gonna get kinda pricey in the next few renewal cycles. The price jump is kind of large after a few years especially since I know many of their costs should have gone down (disk space, servers and bandwidth); the software is already written and has had minimal user changes over the last two years.

Honestly, I'm sure it saves me more way than $45 a year worth of time. But can something save me more time, I know in the past MailBlocks saved me more time. So I'm looking for suggestions for some other Challenge/Responce mail system.

There is one thing I really dislike about SpamArrest, while I can use any mail client to read my mail, to check and approve spam I have to go to their web site and that takes a lot of time (and this is a feature I miss from the now deceased MailBlocks). The reason I have to check it is for mailings from new companies that I deal with and for people who don't pay attention to the e-mail that gets mail back to them immediately to ask them to confirm they are human (I even have info about me and a picture of me in the e-mail so they know it's really me).

In the meantime, I'm using my free gMail account. I want to see how well that works, they give me all sorts of space for free and it's pretty fast and it works well on cellphones (their client, their web interface and should work with phone clients). They've got a fancy web interface and plain web interface so it works pretty well everywhere. Although, with my client I can't see the spam folder there either. Google lets you create additional addresses for the same account and have decent filters. Plus, they will let you use your own domain if you'd like to; so if it really works out, I'll attach my GaryLaPointe.com domain to it and use it for my mail (as long as that supports IMAP). And if it works as well for me, it's free! There's some weird mapping between GMail and the Mac Mail.app (I think by default you get duplicates of the mailboxes) but there's some work arounds, or maybe the new Mail.app in Panther fixes it...

Also, I figure after trying it for a few months, SpamArrest might send me a promo to lure me back. If that's the case I'll know I've done due diligence to try another option and I'll have possibly saved a few bucks in the mean time.

Actually, I have one other minor complaint about SpamArrest, the interface could be faster. There's something about the web interface that slows things down. I notice when I travel, it's unbearably slow and I'm not sure why. But it's a huge minus when I travel...

I do get some referral dollar$ from SpamArrest (maybe $8.75 a year?), so I figure if I'm sending clients to them, so are others (therefore, they're likely growing).

Technorati Tags: gMail, Google, spam, SpamArrest

Free Credit Karma

So I found a free offer code for CreditKarma. They're offering free daily credit scores (from TransUnion). Use code CKFRND as invitation code at https://www.CreditKarma.com/ (I'm not certain I should be giving this code out, so I'm not hot-linking the site address) I found this at SlickDeals.net. The site is appears to besponsored by advertising and you will not be required to enter your credit card information or sign up for trial offers, but you will receive relevant partner offers (i.e. junk mail) based on your profile. This will not affect your credit rating (other than you paying attention to it).

I've always wondered how much my credit score fluctuates but even when I've had free offers before, but I've never bothered to log on every day to check. This looks like that on-line they give you a nice progressive graph from when you started (it's hard to tell since I'm just on day one), hopefully it keeps a daily tally even when I don't log in. Plus, they rank you to national stats and other members; their community has a some good credit, I actually score better nationally than with their membership (and I've got great credit).

UPDATE: So I've done this for a few days and it looks like the graph is just going to get me monthly averages, although it appears to pull the score daily (but it hasn't changed for me yet).

UPDATE 2: I did ask for a credit increase on Wednesday, I was charging a few vacations so I wanted some wiggle room and I noticed my score went down three points today. I'm not sure if that's for the credit check or the one vacation I already charged and sine it's raised my debt level a tiny bit...

Technorati Tags: Credit Karma, credit rating, credit score, CreditKarma, transunion

I Need a Graphics Tool to do "Live" Cropping / Zooming

I'm sure someone out there can help me with my problem, but I don't know what to call it so I can't Google it. I'm trying to create some banners that are 865x180 pixels (the specific size doesn't matter, that's just what I'm using today). I've got lots of images that are way bigger than that so I need to be able to zoom in and out and see what it'll look like if I crop it. I've been doing it with some other tools, but my zooming scales are limited with Graphic Converter (I need some in-between scales) and with iPhoto (I do want to do this on my Mac) I've got no decent way to see what the crop will look like. Graphic Converter almost does it, because if I'm close (but bigger) I can paste it in a smaller window and fine-tune it; but when I want to look at an image at 20% or 30%, it's not an option,

Obviously, I'd prefer to not have to get an ultra-exspensive tool for this. But there's got to be a better way than I've been experimenting with. I'm hoping a flash tool that I upload my photo to and it zooms around for me. Or maybe just using a tool in a way I haven't tried it yet...

It's been 4 years since I started blogging.

It's been 4 years today since I started blogging. It wasn't really a plan. I had just looked into it for a bit and one day I had something to say and kept going...

I think this will be post number 1677 (that averages to a little more than 1 posts a day) and 2,299 comments.

Thanks for listening and commenting everyone!!!!! And if you've just been listening, speak up and say HI

I'm also guessing I've had about 1,000,000 spam comments deleted with via my different filtering systems (about 30,000+ spams deleted by hand).

I need a better way with MovableType to reply to a comment and also post the reply to the web site at the same time. (Anyone?)

Technorati Tags: anniversary, blogaversary

Add to Wish List

So the last few times I've been bouncing around on Amazon I've noticed the "add to my WishList" option has disappeared! I'm logged in, but it seems even in the past it was there when you weren't logged in. This is annoying...

Also, I've always thought this link should appear in your cart next to "delete" and "save for later" just in case you change your mind, you can put it in someone else's mind.

Has anyone else noticed this? Or am I missing something?

Later - Of course now that I'm looking for something else (that's out of stock) I see the WishList button again....

Tico Times - Costa Rican English Newspaper

So a few weeks before I left I subscribed to the TicoTimes. It's a weekly English nation-wide newspaper about the size of Metro Times or a magazine from the Sunday section of a newspaper that comes out on Fridays in Costa Rica. A month's subscription included the ability to download the PDF file every week. It's a little hard to read on the screen, I think I get one more electronic issue, but I'll probably buy a copy tomorrow.

It was nice to get a feel for what was going on in the country. From a to do list it wasn't very helpful to me. It comes out on Friday and the calendar generally doesn't stretch much past the weekend. So I might go somewhere else tomorrow and I should have stayed here for something, but I've already made my arrangements. I did find out about some kind of air festival in the northwest but I forgot all about it, I'll have to check on that...

From a news standpoint I did know the rainy season was dying down early, I know the colon was going to go up in value (their "Greenspan" changed something), that the phone company might go on strike (they didn't) and a few other things. It's definitely worth the $8 to get the four issues on-line if you're considering traveling the country. I recommend this for anywhere, I've gone to the bookstore and picked up a newspaper for London, England to get an idea of what's going on there too (you might have to reserve these in advance).

Technorati Tags: news, newspaper, puppy, Tico Times, TicoTimes.net

Digital/Photo PostCards

Has anyone used of any photo sites (like SnapFish, etc.) where I can upload a photo and I can type in some text and address and it'll mail it to someone as a post card? Just to clarify, they will mail the photo as a single paper postcard (with my text on the back) and it'll be delivered to their physical mailbox by their mail carrier.

It looks like SnapFish will do it for 99 cents, I've never used them. Has anyone tried this? Found anyone they like better?

Technorati Tags: Digital Post Cards, Post Cards, postcard

WalletNook.com

On The Big Bang Theory tonight they mentioned "WalletNook.com". So. of course, I tried to go to the site. Here's my question: Why would Warner Borthers purchase WalletNook.com and not create a page there at least to redirect you to The Big Bang Theory page? Or even sell that wallet?

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (DOM-1708796)
4000 Warner Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91522 US

Technorati Tags: domain name, The Big Bang Theory, Wallet Nook, Wallet Nook dot com, WalletNook.com

Looking to Expand My Social Networking...

So I'm playing around with some of the social networking sites and I need a few more friends. So, if you use any of the following and you're looking for a few more people to add, please feel free to add me. In particular I'm trying to get a better feel for FaceBook so I need a few more there so I can see how people are really using it.

Amazon MP3 store - 89 cent songs!

So Amazon opened the Amazon MP3 store which has been getting some good reviews and (most importantly) it semi-integrates by pushing your purchases into your iTunes which is great for automatic syncing with your iPod. They've had tracks for download for ages, but this is their big jump into the market (you do need their downloader for this).

I actually spotting it yesterday when searching for some music but I didn't realize the format change of my search results indicated a whole new service. I did notice that the tracks were only 89 cents though!

Keep in might for 89 cents they are a dime less than the iTunes music store for regular tracks but since there is no encryption (DRM) and it's encoded at a higher quality (even than Apple I believe) these are 40 cents less than Apple's $1.29 a song. That's about 1/3 less if you've been getting the DRM-free higher quality songs (and that's what I've been getting lately). And they are MP3s, so they play on just about anything (but higher quality does mean larger songs). Buying whole albums will generally discount the price.

There are exceptions to the 89 cent price for the individual songs, but I can't figure out the rules to tell you. And like the iTunes store I believe there are tracks that can't be purchased separately from the album, I thought I saw that yesterday but I can't find an example of that today.

And to be fair to Apple, their DRM free $1.29 songs are generally much cheaper if you buy the whole album (the 14 track One Cell in the Sea - by A Fine Frenzy is only $7.99 (which I think is the same as the iTunes DRM version) which is the same price as the Amazon mp3 store, except Amazon doesn't appear to give you the booklet.

So the end result, IMHO, it'll never beat the seamlessness of the iTunes Music Store but but with it's downloader (which does give you a free song), Amazon mp3 might be a good alternative or at least a second place to check when shopping for songs. If you're not an iPod user it's probably a great place to consider for your mp3 shopping (I think the downloader will push the tracks to other players but since I don't have any I"m not certain). The downloader does work pretty good, I did try it. It would be nice if it were smart enough to add it to an "Amazon Playlist".

I fully expect to see them selling movies, television, music videos, audio books or distributing podcasts via the same mechanism in the future....

Technorati Tags: amazon, Apple, download, iTunes, iTunes music store, mp3, music store

Jott is So Cool!

So many times I wish I could call someone late at night or early in the day to leave a message without waking them. THere are some services that delay delivery like this, but they're (at least in the past) costly and slightly difficult.

Enter Jott: It lets you set up a list of people on-line. You call Jott say who/what you want to Jott (you put yourself in the list too) and then leave a thirty second message and it sends it to their e-mail. Did I leave out that it very accurately transcribes the audio file into text for you too?!? And it's free?!? And it includes an audio file link too, just in case the transcription is garbled. Think about that before I tell you what else it does...

It'll post it to a blog for you too (Blogger, WordPress (even if self-hosted), TypePad, LiveJournal), it'll Twitter and Jaiku it for you too and post it to a Yahoo! Group and 30 boxes and you can use it to get Zillow (home value) quotes too. And it'll set up reminders for you too. It's all hands-free with your phone. And it's free!

I just posted a sample Jott for you to read, if you listen you can hear a slight mistake but it's close enough, you've never know unless you listened to it. Other than the sentence in bold that says to read this message, it's just cut and patse. FYI, the sample is a cheat, I really posted it to WordPress and just copied the post here for demonstrations sake. It currently does not work on Movable Type, I think it's just the way MT handles multiple blogs, but since it uses XMLRPCs pretty close to the other blogs I'm hoping it's a simple fix (but it's beyond me).

You must try this!!! I've get it set for a few friends, my work e-mail and my home e-mail so I can just call with reminders for me or to get free 30 second transcriptions of text for e-mail that I need to send back at the office.

Sometimes it does take a few minutes (no more than 5 minutes, usually 2 minutes) for the Jott to get transcribed.

Technorati Tags: Audio Blogging, Jott, Jott.com, voice recognition

This is a test of Jott....

This is a test of Jott. I'm actually talking into my telephone right now and Jott is transcribing my voice. It's gonna save it and convert it to text and then it's gonna post it automatically to the blog. Jott is really cool. Give it a try.
Click here to listen - Powered by Jott

Warning - For this test to make sense be sure to read the Jott is So Cool! explanation.

Technorati Tags: Audio Blogging, Jott, Jott.com, puppy, Text to Speech, voice recognition

A Plethora of Things.

So I normally don't put too many topics per post, actually I generally only put one topic per post. But I've been sick and all my little post-its on things to blog about are getting too long. So I'll steal the Bullet Sunday idea from Dave for this week.

WordPress - WordPress is one of the larger blogging platforms, lots of plug-ins and looks well supported. For example, on Wednesday Matt (a WP developer) is having a WordPress 2.3 upgrade party in San Francisco

WordPress 2.3 is coming out on Monday, so come out Wednesday evening and upgrade your blog with the pros. How badly can you screw it up when the developers are right there? If you upgrade your blog before Wednesday come and help out others and make feature requests.

I think it's kind of a cool idea I'd go if I were in the area and I don't even really use it. I'm hoping I can hold off to really using it until after Lisa Sabine-Wilson's WordPress for Dummies book is published. What I don't like about WP is that it's all dynamic (but that's part of what I do like about it too). The dynamic-ness is just going to slow things down; I liked that in MT you can make some pages static and some dynamic but the cool part is MT will cache the pages once it generates them until the next post so it's semi-static. Keep in mind you break some important dynamic function, everything is probably going to break. I think my next blog experiments will be with WP....

Legion of Super Heroes - Season one was great but season two (started yesterday) has the Superman from the 41st century (actually a clone of the 21st century Superman) who has traveled back to the 31st(?) to work with Legion and (I'm assuming) the SuperBoy/Man of the 21st century. It seems like it's going to be a little two complicated. They characters seem liked the characters have gotten a little bit older too (Duo Damsel is so cute).

Snakehead - A new Alex Rider novel is coming out. They've definitely gotten better as the books went along, I recently re-read the first one and it's no where near as good as the later ones.

Blog Cloud on your Shirt

I thought this was kinda neat, SnapShirts.com will read your site and create a blog cloud and print you up a shirt. It's nothing fancy but pretty easy to do.

They'll e-mail you the image to use if you want too. If you've never done anything to generate your word cloud, it's easy to do and interesting to see what comes up.

Technorati Tags: cloud, word cloud

Creative Advertisments

I thought this was a cool ad, the hand straps on the bus make it look like you're wearing a watch!

Technorati Tags: ads, advertisments, creative advertisments, duracell battery, Indivi clothes, IWC, watch

Sports Statistics

So I'm not a big fan of team sports, I go here and there if it's a group (or I get free tickets) but it's just never been my thing. Maybe it's just because there is too much waiting, in line to get in, in the parking lot, between time outs, etc. But I've always liked numbers and I really liked the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game so maybe that's why I got a message sent to me.

The message looked like it was directed to me, it might have just been well formed spam (but there appear to be no ads). But I liked the graphics and stats on "your team's chance of making the playoffs" so I'm linking to the Detroit Tigers page at Sport Club Stats. They've got all sorts of teams and leagues and sports so check it out. Be sure to click out the enlarged graphs/charts too.

Technorati Tags: sabermetrics, sports, Sports Statistics, Sports Stats, statistics

300 Page iPhone Billl

So Justine from TastyBlogSnack.com got her detailed phone bill from AT&T for her new iPhone. They have detailed billing and she had about 30,000 text messages last month. It cost them $7.12 to mail her the bill in a box.

Insane that her bill is that long, but it's also insane that iJustine does a 1,000 messages a day! Of course she has the unlimited plan!

I've never imbedded from "revver" before, in case it doesn't work here's the YouTube link and here's her original post about it. I heard her talking about it on MacBreak Weekly #53 with Leo LaPorte today (but I had no idea she was SO cute)...

Technorati Tags: iJustine, iPhone, revver

1 and 1 downtime (AGAIN!). 1 & 1 has great service when it works but when they aren't working, they have lousy support...

It went down again. And it took two calls for someone to be able to tell me they are aware and fixing it. They need a way to keep customers all up to date. Have they ever heard of a status page (or a blog)? I wouldn't mind any downtime if I could check on it in just a few seconds.

Now it seems as if my permissions are goofed up in some directories.

I'm not sure why you aren't/weren't seeing all the post content all the time...

I'd get rid of them if they weren't so awesome when they were working!!

Technorati Tags: 1 and 1, 1and1

Karnak Temple

Found this cool 360 degree panorama of Karnak Temple. It requires Quicktime (I was there last year, BTW).

(I was actually looking for something on The Moon Landing which was 40 years ago today....)

Technorati Tags: Apollo 11, Egypt, July 20, 1969, Karnak, Karnak Temple, Moon Landing, QuickTime

PayPal Suggestion

If you use PayPal, this suggestion is for you as an individual (not for the PayPal company itself). PayPal lets you add several e-mail addresses to your account to send/receive money. My suggestion is to add a few other addresses that you use to your account. If someone sends you money to one of these other addresses it's way easier to claim it!

And I also think it might be better for you if your current e-mail account ever goes under, the other e-mail will already be on file.

I just had the first problem, and PayPal phone support resolved it for me pretty quick (if I would have shut up and stopped asking questions they probably would have resolved it even faster).

Technorati Tags: PayPal, Pay Pal

How Jeans are Made

Over at The Good Human it was mentioned that a "13 year old understands better than most how jeans are made" and so I went over to Simple Living to read it. Madison, the bloggers daughter, wrote it and it's a great explanation on the resources used to make jeans so go take a quick look at it...

Technorati Tags: Blue Jeans, Jeans, Manufacturing, Resources, The Life of Jeans

1-18-08 Official Trailer up

Here is the official 1-18-08 movie preview. It's so clear it's hard to feel the amateurish video quality that the preview had in the theater...

And they added a third image to the 1-18-08.com site.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I've mentioned the 1-18-08 preview before...

Technorati Tags: 1-18-08, 1-18-08.com, Apple, Godzillia, J J Abram, J. J. Abrams, JJ Abrams, preview, The Parasite

Gmail Paper

So this is a great idea, some have e-mail (gMail) accounts but don't have printers. They access at internet cafes, off their cell phone or at work (where it's not appropriate to print personal mail). But how do you get a hardcopy of your messages? This was a problem the first week or two when my Mom got her computer, she didn't have any way to print.

Solution: gMail paper. You click the "paper archive" button and they'll mail you copies of the messages. "You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged)". Of course it's free, it's from Google but I don't see how they can afford the postage, they say that "The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints". Here's the FAQs. Obviously I haven't seen printouts yet (I wish they had some in the FAQ) but I'll be ordering a few samples later and I'll post what they look like (although printing an e-mail, then scanning it back in to post it electronically seems a little absurd).

Technorati Tags: free, Google

What's Wrong With MySpace...

Forget that it lets you create awful looking pages and that it's ultra slow (partially due to the large quantities of photos and slideshows). We're just talking about normal software problems that would probably save them bandwidth if they fixed/tweaked things (and make our MySpace lives easier and faster). Let's get everyone to stop wasting clicks and using it better (which will stop wasting bandwidth!). I might even spend more time there if it wasn't for all the wasted time...
So here we go (I hope Tom is listening):

Why I hate 1 and 1 web hosting!

I love 1 and 1 web hosting, I really do. Great features, great price, all sorts of configuration options and cheap domains ($5.99 a year). They've got decent reports and now they'll automatically mail me stats. Some of their web interface stuff is a little slow (it's too fancy) but it's got lots of options so I can live with it.

What I hate is their lack of customer communication: